The Internet Can't Compare to the Grand Custodians of Literature

The ever media shy and elusive Margaret Atwood made an appearance in the Wall Street Journal, in a story about her appearance at Book Expo America. What with Book Expo Canada long dead and buried, it's one of the last venues where the books in all their forms and market tested glory are sprayed at an adoring audience.

The most memorable bit -

She described the “serendipitous experience” of walking into a store and picking up two or three unexpected books. She said that unlike the Internet, bookstores provide a filter for customers – they are a modern-day version of hand sellers (earlier, Atwood described how she sold her own first book by going from bookstore to bookstore). Bookstore employees read and make informed guesses as to what their customers would like.

She is so right. The internet is totally unfiltered, so it's just, like, totally impossible to get a personal book recommendation the way those grand old (*sniff*...sorry...nostalgia gets the better of me) librarians used to. Why, I will always remember that one time, in my entire life, when a librarian I knew recommended a book to me. It was such a good book. Yes it was. It was about incest, death, and the tragic loss of innocence of a 12 year old boy.

No, it's not like there are any book blogs, or reviewers out there who passionately engage with their readers about books that have caught their imaginations. I was so used to walking into a Chapters or Indigo and spending a good thirty minutes to an hour with a staff member, discussing my reading wants and needs, and standing there in awe as these noble $10 an hour curators of great literature went out of their way to find the books that were best suited to me.

Oh, wait. Check that. That's just my imagination getting too active. Come to think of it, outside of handwritten book recommendations on the shelves of the science fiction bookstore Bakka in Toronto, not in a single bookstore I have ever entered in my entire life (and I have indeed been known to haunt my share) has there been a friendly staff member who has come up to me to guide me deeper into the worlds of imagination. They'll happily guide my hand into my wallet, but that's where the interaction always begins and ends.

Like everyone else I know, I'd peek at the jacket, hear about a book from a friend, or maybe read about a book in the paper, or (later) online.

Atwood describes an idyllic fantasy that never was. I mean "bookstore employees read and make recommendations?" Since when?

Invariably, whenever I have gone to a clerk to ask something for a recommend, this is the conversation -

"Can you recommend any authors similar in style to (author x)?"
"What genre?"
"Fantasy, I think."
"Fantasy section is over there" Waves a hand vaguely toward the back of the store.
"Oh, uh, okay. How about authors comparable to (author y)?"
"Genre?"
"Mystery/Thriller"
"Mystery section is over there" Waves a hand vaguely towards the back of the store.

Sigh. This bullspit just never ends.

You Tell 'Em Ray!

"[T]o hell with the internet!...It’s distracting...It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

- Ray Bradbury

Old people are awesome. I can't wait until I am a cranky old dude who can say anything I want, to anybody, because I am old and I could give a rat's behind about what anyone else thinks...or am I like that already?

In any event!

Ray Bradbury is trying to save his local library. The story about this is interesting. I especially enjoyed reading how he met Bo Derek. How a fellow his age managed not to have a coronary when she said "I love you!" to his face, is a mystery for the ages.

Also noteworthy is some of the stuff that pops out of old Ray's mouth. One thing in particular he said has taken root inside me, something so true that it's truth smacks you over the head and makes you take notice.

“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Growing up I was a library fanatic. I'd go to the library several times a week, enough so that, even though my family seemed to move every year, wherever I was the librarians seemed to know me by name. And no matter what library I was at, I always managed to find one of those comfy chairs that allow you to sit back and just read, forgetting all concerns about time and space until someone tapped my shoulder to let me know that the library had just closed.

Like Bradbury, libraries were my real schools. Sure I sat in class at high school, but more often than not I'd just be propping up my textbook to hide the book I was actually reading, while waiting for the endless borning-ness to grind to a finish. Since I had the habit of reading the entire textbook in the first week of class, it was rare that my attention was pulled away by something new and interesting my teachers thought to get across to me.

I wasn't the best student, for sure, but I wasn't a disruptive student, and what I did not know, or had trouble with, I always knew I could find what I needed at the library, and where I lived, I could always find a local library.

Funny how quickly times change.

We really need a new Andrew Carnegie today, someone of means who makes not only the spread of knowledge, but founding permanent homes for knowledge their own personal crusade. If, instead of spending gadzillions on the "schools of the future," organizations like the Gates Foundation could spend it on local libraries, directed more towards hard assets like books, and less toward more nebulous and capital intensive things like "internet access," then maybe libraries would not be in such a state of crisis.

As someone who sues the internet everyday, and almost every waking hour at times, I'm far from being a luddite. And while I do not personally prefer to store thousands of books in my own home, I do feel that there does need to be a place, a public place, where those books are stored, and made accessible. E-books and the like may be low cost and easy to distribute, but any electronic information far more susceptible to loss, corruption, or tampering than a book can ever be. When the day comes when I access an e-book file that is as old as the 1952 high school English text I keep at my desk at work, then maybe I'll revisit that view.

But until then...

a few more bon mots from Bradbury!

"I have total recall...I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great."

“The children ask me, ‘How can I live forever, too?’ ...I tell them do what you love and love what you do. That’s the story of my life.”

Standing up to the Man

One little story on the Yahoo Answers board has been picking up steam online lately, and I have to say the whole thing makes me jealous.

Back in high school I had a rep for earning the enmity of the school authorities for a certain political outspokenness, and a willingness to agitate and organize. There was one principal in particular who I did not see eye to eye with, and we had a certain run in that ended less than amicably. The end result being that though I won my little battle, I most certainly did not win the war, as I learned after barely avoiding several subsequent attempts to have me (unsuccessfully) removed from school, and being prevented from being the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper.

Whatever issues I had, they were always small issues that blew up into big ones over time, and my cause, as I look back on it now, while not entirely laughable, would have been better served by a more thoughtful approach. What all happened, and what was done about it, I'll save for another day, but bringing it up allows me to segue into a very interesting story of rebellion, and making a stand that is being approached in the right manner.

An American high school student posting under the alias of Kat Atreides, recently reached out to ask others if their small campaign of civil disobedience was a good thing. Basically, Kat objects to the notion of a banned books list at their school, especially a list that goes for more than a few pages. In response, Kat has stuffed an empty locker with 62 books off of that banned list, and runs a small "illegal" library out of that locker, signing out books, assigning due dates - the whole deal.

In response to Kat's actions, students at the school have taken up reading as the thing-to-do, and that little illegal library is doing a roaring trade in spreading literary subversion to the normally illiterate teenage masses.

Kat is quite certain that when knowledge of the little library finally makes its way to the wrong authorities, suspensions and even expulsions may be in order. And seeing as how the Supreme Court of the United States has regularly come down on the side of school authorities where questions of free speech on school grounds are concerned (schools are mini dictatorships - there is no real free-speech protection), Kat cannot rely on a first amendment defense.

That said, I am sure that if this story makes its way to the court of public opinion, especially through the televised media, this story will become very interesting, very quickly.